Thirty Days
by Salmagundi
Summary: A writing meme - thirty drabbles in thirty days, updated with a new story every day. Day 3: A Handful of Dust. It's good to have some company when you're facing the end of the world. Featuring: China.
1. Undertow

**Thirty Days**

-o-

_Notes: This was an exercise to help with my writer's block. The basic idea is that I write something every day for the next thirty days. All of those will be posted here. In the meantime, I am working on other writing too, and hope to have updates in the near future. Until then, enjoy these._

Day 1: Undertow

-o-

"We're fine, aren't we?" England asks, eyes searching, a tightness in his chest that he can't explain. He isn't even sure why he feels this, why the sense of something clenching his insides in an unyielding grip. The boy is still smiling at him and it should be a good thing. But it only makes him hurt the more.

"Of course." The words roll smoothly off of the child's tongue, blue eyes rise to meet his - clear as the Mediterranian. A smile plays at the edges of those lips, guileless. "Why wouldn't we be?"

He doesn't answer, he can't. The words tangle in his throat and he swallows them down - jagged, sharp things. Why, indeed? Forgiven, just like that? He lets out a breath, coming harder than he expects. "No reason, I suppose..."

Eyes flit away from him and toward the water, bare feet in the rough sand as they wander out past the tide line. The sand is dark beneath them, clinging to their toes. Footprints follow them, darting in and out of the dampness, clear and deeply imprinted in places and fading to near-nothingness in others.

They don't hold hands. Never that. Still, it's the closest they've come, to be able to walk almost side by side.

The boy pauses and England barely notices for a second, going on a few more steps before drawing to a halt himself, turning to look behind. His eyes widen a fraction as he watches those small footprints edge closer to the water, the lapping waves starting to pull at them, pulling them out of shape, obscuring them and clinging to slender, bare limbs.

His mouth opens as he takes a few steps to follow, freezing as he feels the first droplets of water against his toes, salt and cold, too cold for comfort. He edges back a step and watches, brows furrowed, as the boy eases farther out, water surging around skinny knees, dampening the cuffs of the plain blue shorts. The boy reaches a hand down as the wave comes in, the water rolling off his fingers, splitting around the slight barrier of his hand.

When the boy turns his head again, there is some of that same depth in his gaze, the colour reflecting the cold murkiness of the Thames, and then he knows. He knows that they're not fine. A slow blink and the waters calm, back to that same bright shade as before, hiding the dark current beneath.

It's still there though. Now that he's seen it, he cannot unsee. Still there and perhaps one day the bright, inviting surface will lure him in, to be dragged down among the rocks like so many sailors. He takes a step further back from the water. "We should go. The tide is coming in."

"Just a second longer..." Soft, almost dreamy. "Can you hear it...? Can you hear the sea?"

And he can. He hears it in every word, like listening at the mouth of a seashell. "Don't be ridiculous. You'll catch cold out there."

Turning, toward him again, moving through the water toward the shore, the sea drawing back only reluctantly to leave the boy standing there, glistening wet, droplets trailing down the inside of his calves and tracing the curve of one ankle. This time he holds out his hand as he approaches, his eyes guileless as he looks up at England.

England feels the pull, silent and inexorable, a siren's call. He swallows.

A small hand slips into his own and he drowns, even as the ocean recedes behind them.

-o-

A/N: This was inspired by the song "Hurricane" by 30 Seconds to Mars.


	2. Winter

Day 2: A Picture

-o-

Winter

-o-

"Who are you?" England's eyes narrowed, hand reaching out to grab and finding no purchase. Head turns and he's looking into eyes as blue as the summer sky. So long, it had been, that the colour was almost alien - his world was grey and white, wrapped in clinging cold.

"Don't you know?" Lips curled into a sweet smile, and he could almost put his finger on it. Almost. The name slid across his lips and never touched. Fingers brushed against his cheek, tracing the curve of his jaw before skirting upward, grabbing, gripping at something unfamiliar.

Antlers rose above his head in an elegant sweep, he could feel them like his own skin - deeper. The touch sent shivers through his body, a gasp wrung from him. Lips brush the corner of his mouth, trailing kisses and he stutters. Hands on his chest, where his clothing had gone somewhere, disappeared when he wasn't looking. He didn't need to know, not as his lips found those others, tasting earthy and somehow sweet. His own hands stroked down the curve of a naked back, gripping, squeezing, dragging.

Laughter against him as he growled low, vibrations against the bared expanse of throat.

He wasn't England anymore.

He wasn't even Arthur anymore.

And then they were falling, him on top, legs hiked up and around his hips. The brush of teeth against his earlobe.

_Yes. This._

Rain against his bare skin... warm. The snow beneath giving way first to earth, then to clinging mud. It didn't matter, none of it mattered but the act. There was warmth building, suffusing him. It felt like something bigger than himself, pushing outward against his skin and his head tipped upward, a noise that no human throat could form as he pushed. Fingers stroked at the nape of his neck, his eyes snapping open in that moment, looking down into eyes that were unfamiliar and yet he knew them.

Life, sparked in fire, cradled in earth, fed with water. He was part of it. The cycle.

Birth. Life. Death. Birth.

Unending.

He breathed a name.

When he came back, he was lying on his side. One hand flew up to his head, brushed nothing but the shaggy strands of his hair and he groaned, pushed himself upright. Blinked.

Stared at the sight of green amongst the barren brown earth, still peppered with snow. His fingers brushed the tiny leaf of a new shoot sprouting where he'd lain. He let out a breath that didn't fog in the air any longer, got to feet that were no longer encased in that relentless, icy grip. It was warm. He'd almost forgotten what it was like...

England closed his eyes and bowed his head, a smile touching the corner of his lips - gratitude.

Then he stood to greet the new spring, leaving a scattering of seedlings in his wake, surrounding the shallow imprints of a pair of cloven hooves.

-o-

Notes: Umm... yeah. Well... this was based on a picture. Hmm... and England has stolen my creativeness for this meme once again. What's up with that? Another entry tomorrow.


	3. A Handful of Dust

**Day 3: A Poem**

-o-

A Handful of Dust

(China, Poland)

-o-

The sun is still there. Despite everything, China can still feel the warmth of it on his skin, familiar. For a moment he can pretend that things are normal - the minutes and hours counting themselves down until the heat becomes unbearable, when the sun no longer soothes his aching body but flays it. He has no defenses anymore... if they even matter.

Someone is trying to till the soil, the hope of planting something maybe, making it grow. He can feel it, the flutter of flesh, parchment-thin and rough. He doesn't tell them to stop - it gives them some point, something to strive for, and he would not take away what little comfort that may be.

Air rasps in his throat, heavy for a moment, a whistling hiss, like the wind.

He doesn't need to look up to feel the presence of another. So unfamiliar. Unexpected. After so long looking, he'd given up on finding any others. He buries his fingers in the dirt as the other approaches, trying to read their intent in the shuffle of their steps. Uneven. Stumbling over some small nothing, some miniscule flaw. He lets out his breath. And knows.

"I didn't expect it would be you." His own voice is unrecognisable to his ears, harsh. Rocks scraping against the barren earth.

"No one ever expects me." It should be a laughing voice, he thinks, but instead it is soft, tempered. The heat has baked him rough, cracked him, drawn him into jagged edges... but in this voice he hears only the smoothness of rocks tumbled to a gleaming smoothness. A stumble and he turns, finally.

Their eyes do not meet. They can't.

Defeat has made him ugly, he knows this, but even the darkness where those bright eyes should be, even the emptiness is somehow beautiful. Perhaps it's just relief to see another. To not be alone. "Will you sit, aru?" He asks, knowing there is nothing else for them. If he is refused, it will not mean anything... except for being alone. Again. Sit, he pleads in his mind, Sit with me here. Don't go.

Head dipping, strands of long blonde hair almost obscuring the sight of those eyeless sockets. "..." As the silence stretches long, China feels the emptiness settling back into place. The heat is beginning to rise, dry-hot, grains of sand pricking at his rough skin, at the patches of glistening smooth redness where the bombs had struck, burned, cauterised. And then... "This is it, isn't it?" No surprise. No anger. No defeat.

Just fact.

"Yes." Soon he will have to move, to move away from the heat, to buy himself another day. Another week. Another month.

"I'll sit with you." Lips curl in a soft smile, hand reaching out blindly. He doesn't have to offer, simply holds out his own to guide, feels soft fingers curl around his. Sinking down beside him with all the grace of a king, knees folded beneath. China does not break the contact of their hands, waiting for the other to do so. He is achingly pleased when their palms stay pressed, one to the other.

"They were wrong." That voice again, soft, for once uncertain. China knows what he is thinking.

"They could not break you, Polska." He uses the name in a familiarity he would not have dreamed before this day, and sees those lips curl up in that smile again, the brief flicker of fear dissolving. "Here is the proof." Here, in the barren earth, in the sun, in the end of it all.

"Zhongguo." The word does not flow from those lips, but is somehow flawless nonetheless. So rarely said, so rarely heard now. Almost never from another nation, even over his many long years. China is surprised that he even knows it. "This is something I don't know if I can do."

China smiles then. Of course he would not know. China does not know either. How to die. "I think it should be simple, aru... People do it all the time."

They should go. The heat is stifling now - it steals the air from his lungs. He breathes it in and it's fire. They should go.

But they do not.

Now that they are not alone, there is nothing left to fear.

Together, they wait for the world to turn red.

-o-

Wow... okay that was weird and possibly disturbing. And it was based on a fragment of the poem "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot.

Here it is!:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow  
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,  
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only  
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,  
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,  
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only  
There is shadow under this red rock,  
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),  
And I will show you something different from either  
Your shadow at morning striding behind you  
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;  
I will show you fear in a handful of dust

_Frisch weht der Wind  
Der Heimat zu  
Mein Irisch Kind,  
Wo weilest du?_

- T. S. Eliot, "The Wasteland" I. The Burial of the Dead


End file.
